Why do affiliates need a tracker and TDS?

Affiliate marketing is a complex, competitive and time-consuming activity, like any other business as well. A modern successful affiliate, in general, manages multiple campaigns, works with offers from different affiliate networks, buys traffic from various traffic sources, uses different marketing tools which takes too much time and costs too much money. 

Thus, when it comes to running a successful business online, an ultimate tracking solution is a must-have for serious online marketers. The good tracker is like your priceless map when you’re hunting for money. Let’s look why but first it would be better to start from terminology.

So, a tracker is an affiliate marketing software that allows tracking clicks, visits, conversions, payouts and parameters of the visitor of your campaigns. TDS stands for the traffic distribution system, a mechanism that allows distributing traffic according to the parameters such as GEO, IP, device type, browser language, etc.

In general tracker and TDS is one tool. There are hosted (SaaS) and self-hosted tracking solutions. SaaS is considered to be handier. It offers dozens of crucial benefits, such as no downloads, no additional settings, no extra spending on servers/hosting, and no troubles at scaling campaigns. Accordingly, hosted software requires more spends from your side.

You need the tracking software that can tell you the visitor’s IP address, device type, country, time of the conversion and other valuable data. This information is used for extra precise targeting and wider coverage. Tracker detects bots, helps to avoid a ban for redirects and sends your traffic to the most profitable offer thanks to the highly accurate auto optimization mechanism.

The screenshots are taken from the AdsBridge Tracker but you can use any tracker you feel comfortable with.

These variables are the clues you use to be able to optimize your campaigns. By collecting all of this information, it allows you to conduct split testing and constantly improve conversions. For example, AdsBridge SaaS traffic distribution system allows to set up to 100 split paths on each rule; add landings and offers; create several flows and manually set the percent of traffic distribution for each. This will help to test flow more exactly following similar conditions and the same number of traffic. 

As additional benefits of trackers are landing page builder (not every tracker has this option), multi-user access (if you work in a team), a possibility to buy and add your domains and SSL (or free SSL for the domains, bought via the tracker, like AdsBridge) and much more.

So, tracking platform makes it easier to manage, scale and optimize your ad campaigns but which is more valuable – you will not lose clicks in the process.